Thanks for the long guide to "Breeding II", Nayus. After a few more attempts, I succeeded in getting a big string of pinkish cells, and diligently spent 15-20 minutes on observe, boosting reddish cells and killing all greens and blues, but never got even a single "red" cell counted, much less 100. When I boost a reddish cell, it is just as likely to split into green/blue or green/green as it is to yield another reddish cell. Almost never did I see a reddish cell turn into a different shade of red. With more gradual color changes, maybe it would be easier to make selection work. I mostly just found it frustrating, since a few seconds on "incubate" could easily undo a lot of artificial selection work, and there is no way to save progress.

In other news, I succeeded at "Digestion III" (barely) with a smart swimmer. For "Move It!", my previous 4-cell smart-fart swimmer could not do it, but a new simpler 2-cell design can win.

I've completed "Breading II" weeks ago. Try just farming reddish ones because the cells that it counts as "red" are actually not pure red at all. It has some hues mixed to it so it's a bit hard to spot and indeed frustrating. I've succeeded on this by farming a single string of cells and reddish ones appeared on the edge of the light on purpose

Are complex creatures too advanced for you to understand?Well, let me flood you with them.

Do not use Incubate on Breeding II. As you said, it kills the progress. You have to take a much more focused approach.

Would you be interested in a Video Walkthrough of the challenge? I can do it an upload it to the CL Channel

The basic idea on my guide is that you add an artificial selection process to the changes by killing cells that do what you don't want (get away from Red) and boosting cells that do what you do want (get closer to Red).

You can have different approaches, either you chose to boost more than kill or the other way around. I talked about two phases because I find that Boost helps more when you're "far away" from red, but when you're really close, when you almost have red cells, I find the "kill any cell that goes back to less" does a much better job. But either way the focus has to be close. You cannot let generations pass and pass because then you're not guiding nothing and changes will go everywhere, most likely not where you want.

Okay, I finally got it. The photocytes have a lot of modes that are different colors. Boosting a red cell doesn't help if that red mode splits into two green modes. Killing a green cell might hurt the cause, if that green mode would have split into red ones.

It seems that we want to favor not just reddish cells, but specifically to favor genomes with more reddish modes. I noticed that some genomes had more red modes than others, and picked one with a higher than average number of reddish modes. Boosting this and culling the non-red results eventually got me one truly "red" cell to breed. This one red mode only made one copy of itself upon splitting, so it was a struggle just to keep it alive in until another mutation allowed it to double itself, and from there it was just boost, boost, boost.

I've been working on 55: Digestion III in version 91. Now that smart swimmers are possible, I can get up to 300 cells (of 470 goal) with a long-adhesin kite swimmer, seeking coated food. So it seems doable, but still quite hard.

Times like this, it would help a lot to have a radiation slider in the challenge